Linkwarden vs Toby: Which is better? (2026)
The short answer
Toby for the live workflow — saving, restoring, and team-sharing tab sessions; Linkwarden for the long game — an archived, searchable library that outlives the pages in it. Neither substitutes for the other.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Linkwarden | Toby | Marqly |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI auto-tagging | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Semantic search (find by meaning) | — | — | ✓ |
| AI summaries | — | — | ✓ |
| YouTube AI (summary, chat, transcript) | — | — | ✓ |
| Chat with your saves | — | — | ✓ |
| Web highlighter | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Notes on highlights | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Save page as PDF | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Full-text search | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Save all open tabs | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Public sharing (boards/collections) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pocket import | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Browser bookmarks import | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Offline reading | ✓ | — | — |
| iOS app | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Android app | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Browser extension | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free tier | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Public API | ✓ | — | — |
| Self-hostable | ✓ | — | — |
| Price | Free · Cloud: $3/month per user billed yearly (25% off) or $4/month billed monthly | Free · Productivity $4.50/member/month billed yearly ($54/yr) or $6/month; Team $8/member/month billed yearly ($96/yr) or $10/month | Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month |
- Linkwarden
- Free · Cloud: $3/month per user billed yearly (25% off) or $4/month billed monthly
- Toby
- Free · Productivity $4.50/member/month billed yearly ($54/yr) or $6/month; Team $8/member/month billed yearly ($96/yr) or $10/month
- Marqly
- Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month
Pricing
- Linkwarden: Linkwarden has a free tier; paid plans are Cloud: $3/month per user billed yearly (25% off) or $4/month billed monthly. 14-day free trial of Cloud, cancel anytime. Self-hosting is free — Linkwarden is fully open source (AGPL-3.0) with all features included. The Cloud plan has no free tier beyond the trial and supports up to 30,000 links per user (expandable via support).
- Toby: Toby has a free tier; paid plans are Productivity $4.50/member/month billed yearly ($54/yr) or $6/month; Team $8/member/month billed yearly ($96/yr) or $10/month. Free Starter plan caps at 60 saved tabs total — over the limit you keep read access but can't add more. No published trial length. Legacy free accounts were force-migrated to Starter in November 2024.
- Marqly: Marqly has a free tier; paid plans are $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month. 7-day free trial of Pro. Free tier needs no card; Pro unlocks chat with saves and video chat.
About Linkwarden
Linkwarden is an open-source, self-hostable bookmark manager focused on preservation and collaboration. Every saved link is automatically archived as a screenshot, a PDF, and a readable text copy — and can be pushed to the Wayback Machine — so bookmarks keep working even after the original page changes or disappears. Links are organized into nested collections with tags, optional AI-generated tags (including via local models for privacy), highlights and annotations, and full-text search across archived content. Collections can be shared publicly or edited collaboratively with per-user permissions. The project is AGPL-3.0 licensed with all features available when self-hosting for free; the official Cloud service costs $3/month per user billed yearly (or $4 billed monthly) after a 14-day trial and supports up to 30,000 links per user. Browser extensions cover Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, a REST API enables integrations, and official iOS and Android apps arrived in late 2025 with share-sheet saving and offline caching.
About Toby
Toby is a visual tab manager built around the browser's new-tab page. Open tabs save into drag-and-drop collections, whole sessions can be stashed and restored in one click, and collections group into spaces that can be shared with teammates or published as public links that require no Toby account. It began inside Vancouver venture studio Axiom Zen in 2016, was once named a top Chrome extension of the year by Google and Product Hunt, and now claims more than 500,000 users under operator Launch Labs. Extensions cover Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, a web app works anywhere, and companion apps bring collections to iOS and Android. Toby AI can name, sort, and group open tabs automatically. Toby stores links rather than page content, so there is no archiving, highlighting, or full-text search. The free Starter plan caps at 60 saved tabs; Productivity costs $4.50 per member per month billed yearly, and Team runs $8 with SSO and centralized billing.
Which should you choose?
Both tools understand that browsers overflow, but they rescue different things. Toby rescues your working state: sessions of open tabs become visual collections on the new-tab page, restorable in one click, grouped into spaces you share with teammates or publish as links anyone can view without an account. Linkwarden rescues the pages themselves: every save is archived as a screenshot, PDF, and readable copy, auto-taggable by AI, and searchable in full text years later. Toby is a workbench; Linkwarden is a vault.
Choose Toby if:
- Save-and-restore of whole tab sessions is your daily rhythm — it’s the best-in-class workflow here, and Linkwarden doesn’t attempt it.
- Your team runs on shared context: spaces, member invites, org-wide collections, and SSO on the $8/member Team plan.
- A visual new-tab homepage beats a database of links for how you think.
Choose Linkwarden if:
- Links must survive: Toby keeps bare URLs with no archiving or full-text search, so dead pages take their content with them.
- You’re solo and counting dollars — $3/month (or free self-hosted, open source) versus Toby’s per-member pricing and 60-tab free cap.
- Research habits demand highlights, annotations, and search across what pages actually said.
The free tiers tell you who each product wants. Toby’s Starter plan stops at 60 saved tabs — enough to feel the workflow, not enough to live in — and its 2024 forced migration of legacy free users still echoes in a 4.2-star Chrome rating. Linkwarden has no free cloud at all, but self-hosting grants every feature forever. A team that opens the same twenty tabs each sprint should buy Toby and stop fighting it. Anyone building a durable personal reference library should run — or rent — Linkwarden and let Toby’s sessions stay ephemeral.
The option both sides overlook
If the real problem is finding things again, neither Linkwarden nor Toby fully solves it. Marqly auto-tags and summarizes every save with AI and lets you retrieve any of them by describing what you remember — plus a highlighter, YouTube summaries with transcripts, and save-as-PDF. There's a free tier with no card required.
Linkwarden vs Toby FAQ
Can Linkwarden save and restore tab sessions like Toby?
No. Linkwarden has no session workflow — its extensions save chosen pages into archived collections, and there's no one-click stash-and-restore of your open browser state. That rhythm is Toby's specialty. The reverse is equally true: Toby cannot archive page content or search inside it the way Linkwarden does.
Which is better for team use?
Both genuinely support teams, differently. Toby offers shared spaces, member invites, org-wide collections, and SSO on its Team plan at $8/member/month billed yearly — built for shared working context. Linkwarden provides collaborative collections with per-user permissions at $3/month per user, suited to teams maintaining a shared reference archive rather than live sessions.
What happens to saved links when pages go offline?
In Toby, the content is simply gone — it stores links only, with no page archiving, highlights, or full-text search to fall back on. In Linkwarden, your archived screenshot, PDF, and readable copy remain intact, and saves can also be pushed to the Wayback Machine, so the library keeps its value as the web rots.